If my kiddo continues down her current I-only-poo-every-72-hours track, I'm gonna have to start spending every third day at home. Or with her wrapped in plastic wrap. Those are really the only two options at this point, if I want to keep her from leaving her, um, residue, everywhere in this lovely city.
Today, it was Walmart that was christened.
So there I was, wandering the aisles with Baby Girl wrapped snugly against my chest in her Moby, feeling pretty good about: a) the fact that I'd managed to get to the grocery store, b) the fact that Baby Girl was alert and not crying, and that, c) my Mommy brain had actually remembered most of the items on my list, when the incident happened.
As I tend to do when she's in her Wrap and her cute, soft, little legs are bare, I lovingly ran my hand along one thigh as I perused the soup aisle. And that hand came away wet.
At first, I looked down and thought: huh, that's strange that she wet herself so heavily. But no. O-ho-ho, no. That wet hand wasn't just wet, it was covered in peanut buttery-colored poo.
Nice.
My instinct was to first assess the damage, so I gently lifted back the side of her Wrap to inspect the seepage and confirmed that it was, in fact, tainting both her outfit and the Wrap--and was just about to start leaking down her thigh.
I laughed to myself next to the Campbell's selection, glanced heavenward, and thought: grrrr-eat.
Then I begrudgingly started steering my cart toward the front, although I hadn't yet decided if I was just going to abandon it somewhere and slink out of the store, or pay as fast as I could and then high-tail it outta there.
But then my obstinate side kicked in and I thought: nope. I ain't leaving. She's wrapped in this darn thing so tightly that my clothes and her clothes--not to mention the Wrap itself--are already done for. And it would be a pain to have to abandon ship and return to the grocery store at a later date. So I decided to trudge on.
Seemed like a solid plan at the time.
That is, before the seepage continued and I realized that I'd jostled the Wrap enough as I'd checked out the situation down there to leave it not quite as secure as it should have been.
So then, I was forced to zoom erratically through the aisles clutching Baby Girl's squishy, seeping rump with one hand (occasionally moving around the fabric of the Wrap to conceal the growing peanut buttery-colored stain), as I haphazardly steered (if that's what you could call it) the cart with the other. Just throwing the crap into my cart that I could actually remember at the time.
I made it to the front as the Wrap was getting even more unstable (due to the constant fabric moving to conceal the poo) and my hands were growing weary. But I still had the joyous task of unloading the entire cart, paying for all my goods, reloading the entire cart, and concealing the poo as much as possible.
I ended up in a lane with a sweet elderly woman at the register, and she took one look at my frazzled state and the death grip I had on my child and asked if she was about to fall. When I sweetly replied: "Oh no, I think she just has a bit of a dirty diaper," (Why do we lie like that? I knew the diaper was dirty. The s*** was running down my kid's thigh!) she was so incredibly funny and kind and sympathetic all at once, as she trained her eye on the danger zone and said, "I've been there. Done that." Something about a woman whose children are clearly grown and probably parents themselves saying that just made me laugh. We never forget these moments, do we?
About halfway through ringing up my groceries, the sweet woman offered to watch my cart if I wanted to take Baby Girl to the restroom and deal with things, but at that point, I was just set on getting to the car ASAP, so I thanked her and politely declined. Then I made my way to the parking lot by pulling the cart behind me with one hand--occasionally just letting momentum move it along as I got out my car keys and sunglasses--and Baby Girl, the dirty, smelly Wrap, and the seeping poo with the other.
I'm fairly certain that I did not properly sanitize the grocery cart handle after I'd splayed Baby Girl in the backseat to change her, waded up the Wrap, her clothes and the diaper in a heaping pile, and proceeded to load the groceries into the trunk. So let this be a lesson to you all: always, always wipe down the grocery cart handles with a sanitizing wipe if they're available at the front of the store, 'cause you never know when my kid's poo will be on it.
Peace out, peeps.
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